A Flash of Light by Michael Smith - HTML preview

Introduction

We all have experienced some level of stress at some stage in our life. This could be mild frustration at not getting what we want, when we want it, such as standing in a

long queue at the supermarket or experiencing a computer crash just as we have

completed a long email. Stress can also manifest as anger and even rage. Some people

manage to overcome these events and quickly return to a calmer state of mind. Others

cannot seem to let go of the stress and always feel on edge, or annoyed most of the

time.

When we feel frustrated, annoyed or in a bad mood we can very quickly descend into

anger and despondency. This is because we are already stressed and any adverse

event will trigger an even more stressful state of mind.

The definition of stress is a physical, mental, or emotional response to events that

causes bodily or mental tension. Therefore, stress is a mentally originating

phenomenon, which will also have an effect upon the physical body and can manifest

in many forms such as: Tension, frustration, anger, weakened immunity, ill health,

and poor concentration.

Prolonged exposure to stress will inevitably have an adverse effect upon the immune

system. A fully functional immune system may only be minimally affected by stress.

However, major stress events such as; a death in the family, change of job,

redundancy, or moving house, can severely compromise immunity, and an already

weakened immune system can be further damaged by even small causes of stress.

It does not have to be that way and there is an alternative. This handbook will explain how stress develops and how anyone can train their mind to follow a different pattern of behaviour to become more calm and open minded and ultimately a happier

person. So is stress inevitable in all of us? Why do we experience stress at all? Is it possible to avoid stress so that we can become more calm, happier and less

agitated?

So is stress inevitable in all of us?

As we have already discussed stress is a physical, mental, or emotional response to

events that causes bodily or mental tension. What does this actually mean?

We perceive the outside world through our senses, our visual faculty sees objects, our auditory faculty hears, our olfactory sense smells, our sensory faculty senses through touch and physical sensation and our taste faculty experiences flavour. These are all physical organs and have no ability to discern. For example; the eye sees a tree, the physical organ of the eye can not discern if it is a nice tree or unpleasant tree, the eye can not experience emotion and “feel” if it is a beautiful tree or not. This is

experienced through the mind. A baby seeing a tree for the first time does not

necessarily have the memory of a tree and therefore sees the tree purely as it is, a tall green thing. It is only after repeated exposure that the mind will begin to have an

emotional response. Another example, again using a young baby, would be the

experience of hunger. Initially the child does not know that the discomfort they

experience is “hunger” it just experiences discomfort through its senses. When it

latches to its mother’s breast and feeds, the discomfort is replaced by satisfaction.

Discomfort causes crying and satisfaction creates calm and smiles. As time progresses the baby learns that through the act of crying it can communicate its discomfort to the mother and gain satisfaction.

This pattern develops and sometimes if the child always gets what it wants through

crying and complaining we use the term, “spoiled” what we mean is that the child has

learned that it can gets its own way through being disruptive. In Tibet children were sometimes tied to a tree and just left for a few hours so that they learned that crying did not get them what they wanted. Maybe a little harsh by Western standards perhaps

but effective. The point being is that we develop habitual responses to external

phenomena and very often these habits rule our lives.

As we think so we become

Dhammapada - The Buddha

Therefore as we experience the world through our senses, it is our mind and the

habitual responses that we develop that eventually determine our mental state and the way that we respond to events. As such NO external event can actually cause us to be stressed. Just as they eye itself cannot have an emotional response, external

phenomena such as money, houses, cars, relationships cannot in and of themselves be

the cause of happiness or sadness, calm or stress. It is the mind that creates these

emotional experiences.

To give an example. If we think that money can give us contentment then it must

follow that everyone who is rich must be content. If money had the inherent ability to cause happiness then everyone who had lots of money would be happy. This is

actually ridiculous, as we all know, every day we see rich and famous people going

into rehab or suffering from severe depression. The point being made is that external objects and events do not of themselves cause us stress, it is our mind that does that.

So in answer to the question, “is stress inevitable?” the answer has to be no, it is not inevitable, we chose through our habitual response to become stressed. Sometimes

our habits are so strong however that our response becomes almost instantaneous and

it feels as though we have no control whatsoever. But, these are habits and habits can be changed.

! Remember, stress is a choice that we make through our habitual response, it is

not something external over which we have no control.

Why do we experience stress at all?

When we experience events that we do not like our normal response is to try to

remove ourselves from them or become annoyed and frustrated. The more frequently

we experience similar events the more the habitual response is embedded in our mind.

For example, perhaps we are an impatient person. Through life’s experiences we have

developed the mind-set that is impatient. We do not like waiting for things and get

impatient when we do not get what we want immediately. This may have started in

our childhood and through habitual patterns of behaviour this impatience has become

our usual response. So we buy our shopping as usual in the local supermarket. Our

mood is good and we have completed our shopping having bought everything we

needed. Then we see a huge queue at the check out. Perhaps the check out person is

chatting away to a customer oblivious to the growing line of people. The feeling

begins in the pit of your tummy as an uncomfortable churning. The habitual response

has begun. The mind recognises what’s going on as the habit kicks in. You start the

inner dialogue, “why is this person chatting so much when there are so many people

in the line? Why can’t they open more checkouts, surely they can see there are so

many people waiting? I’m going to be late now.”

So the inner dialogue continues, the habit is now made just that bit stronger. The mild churning now begins to become very uncomfortable as the mind continues its ranting.

Now your mood descends into anger and frustration especially as you forgot to buy

eggs and you have to leave the line and go back again. By the time you eventually

leave the supermarket you are angry, uncomfortable and stressed. This stressful state causes the body to produce specific hormones, such as adrenaline, which further

exacerbates your deteriorating mental and physical state. As anger develops you will

experience shaking and agitation and then every negative experience will seem far

worse than they really are. This is stress. What brought it on? Your habitual response did, can you change it? Yes of course, habits can be changed, much as a smoker can

quit, so can the habits of impatience and anger.

! Remember that the stress experience begins in the mind, and so the antidote to

stress must also exist in the way we think.

Is it possible to avoid stress so that we can become more calm, happier and less

agitated?

If the habits that we have created cause us to behave in a particular way then once

those habits are recognised, we can begin to make changes to our behaviour that will

lead to a different way of thinking. As such we can begin to recognise the signs that cause our stressful response to develop and change the way we respond. Let us take

the above example of the supermarket and change the way that we behave.

Example, we now recognise that we are an impatient person. We know that certain

things will make us impatient. Now we have completed our shopping as before, but

this time we remind ourselves that we are impatient and try to think of things that will reduce any potential frustration. “Ah, I forgot to buy eggs,” so now you go and buy

the eggs before you check out. You remind yourself that as an impatient person there

might be a queue. As you approach the check out indeed there is a long line of people.

The usual churning in the tummy begins and you start the inner dialogue as usual.

This time however you again remind yourself that this is impatient behaviour so you

stop thinking about what should be, or what you would like it to be, such as the check out person chatting away, and think about what actually is!

Now you can ask yourself some questions, "Does my frustration and annoyance

actually benefit me? No." Can I actually do anything about the length of this line? No.

Can I stop the check out person chatting? No. Can I start to relax a little and perhaps look around and see if other people are getting annoyed too? Yes." Can I people

watch and see if there are people who are not getting annoyed. Yes. There are people

smiling and laughing as you look around, so now you begin to realise that being

frustrated and annoyed is not actually benefitting you at all. When you leave the

supermarket you are more relaxed, open minded and calm. This has been a change of

the way we behave. Is it easy to do, of course not, no deeply seated habit is going to be easy to change, they have been developed over a lifetime so will take time and

effort to change. Yet they can and will change as new habits form.

Therefore in answer to the question, “Is it possible to avoid stress so that we can

become more calm, happier and less agitated? The response is yes it is possible, with effort and training it is guaranteed that we can change the way we respond to external events that appear to cause us stress.

! Remember that it is not the event that causes us to become stressed but the way

in which we behave towards it.

How can we begin to change the habits that cause stress?

Having now established that stress is not something external but is caused by our own behavioural responses we can now look at the ways in which we can begin to develop

new strategies to recognise the signs and causes of stress before it takes a hold.

The key to changing habits is MINDFULNESS. Being aware in the present moment

allows us to be aware of what is happening around us and within us. Habits only

become automatic when we are not aware of what we are doing. A good example is

when we drive a vehicle using the same route on a daily basis. We know the road, the

particular turns and one-way systems. We know how to drive the vehicle

instinctively, and indeed a part of our mind is aware of the traffic, when to change

gear, brake, etc. However at the end of the journey there are occasions when we do

not remember actually driving the route at all. We have all experienced reading a page of a book and having to go back to the first sentence again because we cannot

remember what we have read. That important introduction when we are told the name

of the person we meet, only to almost instantly forget. These are all good examples of a lack of mindfulness.

The majority of our lives are spent ruminating over the past, what could have been,

what should have been, what you should have said when that person was unpleasant

to you. We spend hours going over past events, wishing things were different, yet we

can’t change the past. We can however learn from experiences, but unless we have a

time machine, we cannot go back and change them to be any different to what they

were. So is it useful to go over past events, of course not, all it does is to reinforce negative patterns of behaviour, stressful behaviour.

We also spend an almost equal amount of time anticipating the future. Hoping things

will work out, planning, scheming and wishing for things that have as yet not

happened. Again we have to ask, is this useful behaviour. Of course not. The future

has not happened so there is little point becoming agitated over what has not yet

occurred.

Very little time is actually spent in the present and as a result we fall back on old habits and patterns. By not being in the present we miss so much of life’s experience.

That car journey when we are thinking about past and future, we are missing the

beauty of the surroundings. When we spend so much time in the past and future we

miss what is going on around us. The reason we do not remember the name of the

person to whom we are introduced is because we are too busy thinking of something

else. The page of the book we can’t remember reading because we were thinking of

what we are going to eat.

The present is where things are happening now and it is where we should be focussing

our attention. By living in the present moment we can see what we are doing, we can

identify clearly what we are thinking and we can be fully aware of the actions we are about to take. Invariably this is not the case and we respond almost subconsciously to our environment falling back on old patterns of behaviour. Taking actions that

inevitably will not have been carefully considered, which then result in a negative

outcome.

! Remember, being fully aware in the present allows for considered thought,

considered actions and positive outcome.

How can we become mindful?

In our busy life our mind is full of thoughts, hardly a nano-second goes by during our conscious awareness that we are not thinking about something. It sometimes seems

unnatural not to think after all its what the mind does. Even during sleep, we dream

and dreams are composed of thoughts as well, so in fact we are actually thinking 24/7.

Imagine the mind as a river. The nature of the river is actually pure clear water, yet as it flows downstream it gathers impurities, objects, chemicals, insects and even fish, and by the time it flows by us it is so full of additional things we can hardly see its clarity at all. This is like the mind, so full of thoughts and images there is hardly any space for clarity and calm. The real nature of the mind is clarity and spaciousness and it becomes clouded with thoughts, fears, delusions and negative emotions. It is

therefore hardly surprising that when we take actions with these states of mind that

the outcome of those actions is not always what we wish. Therefore the key to

mindfulness training is MEDITATION.

Meditation is an ancient practice dating back many thousands of years. It is a method by which we look internally rather than externally for the causes of our well-being

and happiness. We search outside for the things that we think will bring us happiness and contentment, but inevitably if we are not happy within ourselves, then nothing

external will provide us with any long lasting satisfaction. Therefore, it is essential that we must look at ways of achieving an inner peace, a calmness and rational

behaviour that leads to intelligent decision making and at the same time, allows us to enjoy life to the full. Meditation has been proven to reduce the effects of stress,

increase concentration, and focus as well as having positive effects on the immune

system. It also enhances a feeling of contentment and induces a sense of calm and

space allowing us to make intelligent and well-conceived actions, rather than simply

‘reacting’ through our normal repetitive habitual responses.

What is the point of meditation?

Everyone wants to be happy and no one wakes up with the intention to spend their

entire day being miserable, stressful, confrontational and difficult. If we had total control over our own mind then we would not wish to be unhappy and discontent. Yet

our minds often seem to have a will of their own. Even if we were to start our day

with the intention of being calm and collected, we will inevitably encounter a

situation where this does not happen. The reason for this is that we have not

developed the habit of a disciplined mind. Our own minds are often confused,

scattered, and lack concentration. Rarely do we focus in the present moment and

concentrate 100% on what we are doing. Hence we are driven by our habitual

tendencies and simply ‘react’ to situations rather than ‘act’ based upon a rational and intelligent view of the reality of the situation.

Our minds have developed habits since birth and tend to revert to those same habits

when encountering similar situations. This gives rise to negative emotional responses and ultimately this affects our actions, causing many problems such as stress,

discontent, relationship issues and even our own health.

Through meditation we can train our minds to be calm, more open and spacious. This

leads to better concentration and focus that allows us to avoid falling into negative habituation and repeating the same errors we make time and time again. Usually our

mind is full of many different thoughts that arise through stimulation from our senses.

This vast array of continual thought process does not allow us the space we need to

make well considered responses and we are simply drawn into emotional turmoil that

can be very gross such as anger and frustration, or it can be very subtle such as a

general feeling of dissatisfaction and ill at ease.

A regular practice of meditation a few minutes every day we can learn to re-program

our minds and develop a more positive attitude and a better understanding of how

things really present to us rather than the fantasy of how they seem to appear.

We are often deceived by appearances. Ask ten people who witness an accident and

you will get ten different answers. The truth is relative to the observer and we cannot always trust how things appear. This can result in misperception and negative

emotional responses. Meditation allows us to be more aware and respond accordingly.

The techniques that will be described in this book are not necessarily dependent upon any belief system and can be practiced by anyone.

Meditation also has a profound effect on the immune system thereby decreasing the

risk of illness. Clinical studies have shown that through a regular practice of

meditation techniques certain pathways in the brain can be altered allowing old habits and thinking processes to be changed. Many athletes now meditate as part of their

training, this allows for better concentration and more focus. Even meditation in the workplace is becoming more popular and helps to reduce stress, increase performance

and motivation as well as enhancing inter-personal relationships both in the office and at home. Conflicts are either avoided or reduced and a more calm, creative and stable environment is promoted.

! Remember, meditation is a method to train the mind from its habitual patterns

of thinking. Much as the body needs exercise to stay healthy, so does the mind.

Consciousness

To understand how to meditate it is useful to understand the role of consciousness. It is not difficult to understand that the body is composed of matter, molecules, atoms, sub-atomic particles, etc. However the mind is non-matter and as yet science has not

identified the energy or structure of mental consciousness. Aspects of scientific

research such as neuro-chemistry, psychology and neuro-science has made substantial

discovery into how the mind behaves and interacts with the body but as yet these

discoveries are limited mainly to behaviour and neuro-chemistry.

Is the mind purely a result of electrical and chemical activity in the brain? Many

scientists now dispute that this is the case and that consciousness is more than simply chemical reaction. When we feel an emotion we often place a hand over our heart. For

centuries philosophers have maintained that the centre of consciousness is the heart

channel and not the brain. The brain may control bodily function and mind certainly

influences brain activity but is the brain necessarily the seat of consciousness? Certain observations such as Para-normal activity observed when twins appear to know when

one is in trouble or dying despite being many thousands of miles apart. There are also instances of people remembering previous lives, especially very young children.

Therefore we can perhaps assume that consciousness is not simply brain activity but

something more that as yet science has not been able to measure. This is the case with Quantum Physics. Initially science thought that the electron was the smallest particle, but in the last 100 years there have been substantial developments as technology has

become more accurate and refined in detecting sub-atomic particles such as the

quarks and more recently the Higgs Boson.

We understand that it is essential that we exercise our body to maintain our health and well-being but we rarely exercise the mind. Meditation can be seen as an exercise for the mind. Through regular meditation practice we can learn how to become more

calm and ultimately more happy.

Happiness

All living beings strive to be happy, this is a consistent feature of every living being from insects to humans. None of us want to suffer, feel stressed or want to live in fear and we all want to be content, happy and calm. The very nature of our mind is to be

aware. Like a pure spring its nature is clear and knowing yet our minds are filled with impurities, bad habits, poor thinking patterns, lack of awareness. This leads to our

mind becoming emotionally turbulent as soon as we encounter problems or things that

we do not like. Equally we also undergo high’s and low’s that become exaggerated

and cause emotional upheaval.

For example, we constantly wish for new experiences. This relates to jobs,

relationships, even to simple things like a new computer, or fashion, or a new house, or car. We exaggerate the positive attributes of phenomena thinking that these

external things can make us happy. We think the new job, house, or relationship will

bring us happiness and we exaggerate the qualities to suite our desires. Yet after time we realise that the qualities we attributed to these things did not exist as we thought they did and we then become disillusioned and disappointed. Then the exaggeration

of the negative qualities of phenomena begins as we seek something else to satisfy us.

The same process happens with all phenomena, we think that external things will

bring us happiness and contentment but unless we are happy within, they can never

live up to our expectation and so we move through life like a roller coaster of

emotional turmoil. Happiness may come about temporarily but eventually we will

seek some new experience to satiate our constantly craving mind-set unless we

change the habitual patterns of thinking.

Therefore only true happiness can come about through internal change and there is

nothing external that can provide us with contentment. We see this with people who

are millionaires and have fame and prestige and they can buy anything they desire;

yet they commit suicide, take drugs, turn to alcohol and cannot find contentment in

their lives. Why is this? Because the mind does not look inwardly for peace and

contentment and the exaggeration and fantasy we develop results in disturbing

emotions, which in turn create actions that have negative consequences.

It is only through meditation that we can change the habitual patterns of behaviour

that rule our lives. By looking inwards and calming the mental chatter we can

gradually train our mind to view the world as it really exists and not how we think it should be.

! Remember, happiness does not come from anything external. If our mind is

dissatisfied and not content then nothin